Rendering nested/threaded comments

Question

Following this SO post, I am trying to render indented comments using the acts_as_tree rails plugin with no success.

I believe the problem lies with this method (which I don't understand):

def indented_render(num, *args)
  render(*args).gsub(/^/, "\t" * num)
end

What does this method substitute? My partial is as follows:

%div{:id => "comment_#{comment.id}"}
  = comment.body
  = render :partial => 'comments/comment', :collection => comment.children
  - unless comment.children.empty?
    = indented_render 1, :partial => 'comments/comment', :collection => comment.children

However, none of the lines are indented. What am I doing wrong? Is there a better way to render the comments?

Update: This is the generated html:

<h1>Listing comments</h1>
<table>
  <tr>
    <td>
        <div id='comment_1'>
          (152) Facebook version of you: 400 friends. Real version of you: 4 friends
        <div id='comment_2'>
          (0) Well played.
            <div id='comment_3'>
              (0) I used to. Then I got married.
                <div id='comment_4'>
                  (17) math is hard
                    <div id='comment_5'>
                      (1) What's a math?
                        <div id='comment_6'>
                          (1) This made coke come out my nose.
                            <div id='comment_7'>
                              (2) So maybe I wasn't the best with fractions.
                            </div>
                            <div id='comment_8'>
                              (1) That sounds terribly painful. Please accept my apologies. Isn't it supposed to be going in your nose, not out?
                            </div>
                        </div>
                    </div>
                </div>
            </div>
        </div>
    </div>

No, there are no tabs at all. I've attached what my html looks like. — David, May 08 '11 at 08:31
I think I figured it out. I had `thread->comments` (2 different models) and I wasn't sure how to show the entire thread history that way, so I made a dummy root comment and made it the parent of the thread's comments (`thread->root_comment->comments`). Is there is a better way to do this? — David, May 09 '11 at 09:29

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered May 08 '11 at 08:44

I think the tabs are just to make the generated HTML a bit prettier. It looks like the resultant HTML is properly nested to produce a tree-ish structure, you just need some CSS. First of all, you probably want a class on the comment wrapper <div>s so change this:

%div{:id => "comment_#{comment.id}"}

to this:

%div{:id => "comment_#{comment.id}", :class => 'comment'}

And then, in some CSS somewhere, try this:

.comment {
    margin-left: 20px;
}

That should indent the nested <div>s to give you a start at a tree structure.

Looks like you're using HAML and my HAML isn't that great but hopefully the above is close enough to correct to get you something useful.

Rendering nested/threaded comments

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